Death toll at German music festival rises to 19
A stampede inside a tunnel at a popular techno music festival killed 19 people and injured over 340 on Saturday, police officials said Sunday
It was unclear exactly what set off the panic among the throngs of young people squeezing into the tunnel leading to festival grounds in the western German city of Duisburg, but the police said they had tried to close off the area because of overcrowding just before the stampede.
Hannelore Kraft, the premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia expressed shock and said an investigation would be opened in order to establish the reasons for the catastrophe. Duisberg is a major industrial city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state.
The police reported telling the crowd to turn around and walk in the other direction before the panic broke out.
The scene was so chaotic that other festival attendees, unaware of the deaths, kept dancing and listening to music for some time, news services said.
Spokesman Frank Kopatschek told the news agency DPA on Saturday evening that “the city of Duisburg’s action committee has decided not to end the festival for now, for safety reasons.” Mr. Kopatschek said the city was concerned about preventing further panic among the 1.4 million people in attendance.
Rescuers reported delays in reaching injured people because of the size of the crowd.
“It’s a horror situation, especially because rescuers cannot get through to those injured,” Thomas Muenten, a reporter for ZDF, the German public television channel, said in the early evening. “The people literally trampled each other on the way into this tunnel.”
Photos and television images of the scene after the crush showed many young people looking dazed, with personal items that had been left behind scattered around them.
“There were piles of injured on the ground, some being resuscitated, others dead and covered with sheets,” said Isabel Schloesser, 18, according to Reuters. “It was way too full in the afternoon. Everyone wanted to get in.”
The music event, called the Love Parade, is one of Europe’s biggest electronic music gatherings, attracting young people from many countries.
Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her condolences and said she was “horrified that young people went to party and were instead met by death and injuries.”
The police said thousands of young people were still waiting to get into the festival when officers closed the area. At one point, according to witnesses, it was impossible for people to move forward or backward in or near the tunnel.
As people felt stuck, the witnesses said, they panicked.
“At some point the column of people got stuck, probably because it was closed up front and we saw that the first people were already lying on the ground,” Udo Sandhöfer told the N-TV commercial television channel.
But an emergency services official, Wolfgang Rabe, told ARD television that some people had tried to enter the area by climbing a fence along a ramp and fell, possibly starting the panic, Reuters reported.
The Love Parade, started in 1989 as a peace demonstration, was held for years in Berlin, but has been held in the industrial Ruhr region of western Germany since 2007.
In 2000, at least eight people were crushed to death and scores more were injured at a rock festival in Roskilde, Denmark, when fans rushed the stage during a Pearl Jam concert.
Source: The New York Times